Tell me your experience with the best tech rockstar

Aug 31, 2021 32 Comments

You know the type.
The 10x engineer.
The coding machine.
The person who single handedly finishes the project over the weekend, and fixes few other things on the way.
The soft spoken Richard Hendricks IRL.

My experience: shit was broken, nobody had an idea why, gave up while this ever-lazy clock puncher person stays late because things just got interesting and fixes the issue in 2 hrs by going 4 layers down to the os networking stack.

#engineering #software #swe

Tc:500k

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TOP 32 Comments
  • New / Eng
    sadpeepo

    New Eng

    BIO
    dropout
    sadpeepo
    My team recently hired a new principal engineer and I was asked to help them as their onboarding buddy. I didn’t know what I (a SDE3 with 6 YOE) could help this new PE with, but I figured I could at the very least help him find wikis.

    The first thing that shocked me was that this new PE was only 27 years old. I’ll admit I felt a bit annoyed and kind of jealous - here I am close to 33 years old and only SDE3! As we got to talking it became apparent to me that this guy was next level - he clearly knew how to think big and was asking questions about our service that had me stumped. I didn’t hear from him for a few days, and figured he was reading through the onboarding wikis.

    Later that week he submitted his first CR and, I’ll be honest, I was shocked. He skipped the onboarding assignments and instead started to pick up issues that were in our sprint. The CR he submitted was for an issue I had been working on for the past 3 weeks - we had a nasty race condition that was causing fatals to be thrown almost every other request. What had taken me over 3 weeks of investigation took him a mere two days, and his solution involved a major refactoring of our entire SQS processing package. Our L7 PM was so happy it looked like he could cry - we were finally green for prime day.

    I’m stil shocked. I finally mustered up the courage to ask him to lunch this Monday to learn more about his past work experience, and he explained to me that he didn’t have a degree and has been programming since he was 12, and had just finished a 12 month internship as bag boy at Albertsons. As I looked into his eyes I saw years of engineering experience and wisdom... it was as if I was staring into Pandora’s box.
    Aug 31, 2021 9
    • Typical story of every Ex Albertsons engineer. Where ever they go, they simply rock
      Aug 31, 2021
    • New / Eng
      sadpeepo

      New Eng

      BIO
      dropout
      sadpeepo
      yes this is copypasta
      Aug 31, 2021
  • Google
    test@

    Go to company page Google

    test@
    Man there was this guy in my team. Super smart, super modest, loved working with new people to help them ramp up. He did TL job all day and probably only coded for an hour each day. But he knew everything so well that his 1 hour day was a week of my time. Easily a 100x engineer. Partly due to code base knowledge but mainly due to how good he was with C++ and knew how to write the cleanest code I have ever seen. Databricks poached him. What a bummer. I was really sad for a few days but then his golden words of wisdom were so so helpful (those words are for my ears only :-) ). Dude deserved 1M TC and it would still be less.
    Aug 31, 2021 5
  • LinkedIn
    shdbeuwnab

    Go to company page LinkedIn

    shdbeuwnab
    Had one guy who wrote more useful tools and utilities than our entire productivity team in his free time. They took his work, managed to make it worse and more complicated.
    Aug 31, 2021 2
  • Zoom
    SomeoneAtZ

    Go to company page Zoom

    SomeoneAtZ
    At Google: The team managers were evaluating an outside vendor for a certain project to deliver some key pieces of the technology.

    This engineer kept saying it could be done better in house, and pointed out major issues with the vendor's work.

    The engineer took a weekend to write the entire thing and had a workable product by Monday which surpassed the vendor's work. Super clean code.

    Unfortunately the whole project / department was cancelled shortly afterwards 😆 because google loves to kill things
    Aug 31, 2021 1
  • Amazon
    mj1

    Go to company page Amazon

    mj1
    The story about Bret Taylor I most vividly remember is from our days at Google. He wasn't even an engineer there, instead, he was a product manager for some reason. As the PM on Google Maps, he was frustrated that the JavaScript was really slow. It would take forever to load. So, one weekend he said, “I'm going to rewrite it”. And he rewrote the entire thing, making it 10 times as fast and a third of the size. He completely threw away the code that a team of engineers had been working on for months. Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally, no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.
    - Paul Buchheit (https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit)
    Aug 31, 2021 1